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... a dead horse my album. Most folks reading my LJ probably
know this already, but copies of my CD, Coffee,
Computers, and Song!, are still available from CD Baby. I'm shipping them
another 10 copies this morning.

The other major accomplishment this weekend was clearing the boxes of
debris off Colleen's old cedar chest in the garage attic, and clearing
enough of a path that Kat and I will be able to get it down. As older
daughter, Kat will be inheriting it. I believe Colleen got it from her
grandmother... It's been in the attic for well over a decade. Of course,
it will still have to be passed down over the edge into the stairwell; the
"footpath" between the boxes is too narrow, winding, and cluttered to be
usable.

A number of things didn't get done, including data-entry for
taxes and scratch tracks for the next album. Hopefully I'll get started
on those this evening rather than letting them go until the weekend:
that's likely to be busy. Not as insanely busy as the weekend after that,
though.

Gradually getting ready to go; spent altogether too much time last night
and this morning on lingering household computer issues, and not enough on
taxes. Hopefully I'll have time to deal with them today while I'm
supposed to be working during lunch. Makes sense anyway, since I
ought to copy the forms before I send them.

Did a preliminary test-pack -- I'm going to need a second carry-on for
things -- mostly gifts -- that are light but bulky. I'm using the flower_cat's new purple suitcase that we got at Costco last year;
the second carry-on will be an ancient Hartman duffel that my parents
bought in Japan 30-odd years ago for a similar purpose. It'll squish down
into the suitcase for the trip home.

I'll be taking up 50 or so copies of Coffee, Computers, and Song -- hopefully there will be some
dealers to take some of them off my hands when I get there.

As of a visit to the post office tomorrow morning I'll have most of the pre-orders of
Coffee, Computers, and Song in pre-addressed envelopes
shipped off. The rest will require another round of signing and
packaging, not to mention another round of minor hacking to pull together
a mail-merge file from the various transaction files.

Just verified that k3b, the program I used to burn the master
for CC&S, doesn't put in pregaps by default. In fact, it basically
doesn't know about them at all: you have to (explicitly, manually) add 2
seconds of silence at the end of every damned track. IDIOTS!!

My own damned fault for not listening to the master carefully enough. Too
late now.

As it turns out, ConChord is shaping up to be a very small con, with
nothing scheduled before 6pm on Friday. Just as well; that let us spend
Friday recovering from the drive down, meeting old friends, handing out
pre-order packages, and not getting very much done.

The original plan had been for the flower_cat to connect with
tibicina and cflute in the morning for a trip to
Penzey's spices in Torrence, but they didn't arrive until noonish. The
theme of this weekend appears to be real-time scheduling.

We'd originally thought of holding a CC&S release party, but between a
late start and the fact that there was a "New Stuff Listening Party" on
the schedule kicking off the con at 6pm, we sensibly decided to bag it.
In past years the listening party was normally held at the reception,
which was cheese and veggies on the poolside patio. But since the
acoustics were so terrible two years ago, they decided to put the
listening in the concert hall on the second floor, and let people drift
between them. I have no idea how many people were there to hear my
album.

The con was kicked off properly by a concert by Joe Bethancourt. The
schedule is very much a work in progress; more so than at most cons I've
been to. The short concerts on Sunday are especially flexible, so after
cflute mentioned that 11:30 Sunday morning was a bad time for
a concert, and signed herself up for a slot at 3pm, I talked to Rod
O'Riley (who's doing the schedule) and moved mine. It'll probably end up
at 3:30, so we'll do a combined sound check.

So far I've distributed somewhere between 15 and 20 pre-order packages,
and sold 50 to the two dealers. The main feedback so far has been a
comment from R.O'R that there didn't appear to be the usual 2 seconds of
silence between the songs.

If that's the only problem I'm not going to worry about it too much. Next
time I'm going to schedule at least a week to live with the actual master
and make sure it's exactly the way it's supposed to be.

I'm writing this in the lobby, waiting for ConChord to start (or,
alternatively, for somebody interesting to show up and be snared by the
flower_cat, who is sitting next to me being even more bored.

Last night I built another 16 pre-order bundles -- I'm probably going to
need more eventually. This morning I put the final touches on the
Interfilk package: pre-order bundles 2B and D4. Before we left I printed
up the songbook and the short fiction, and stuffed them into an old Zilog
binder. It was big enough that I could keep the uLisp and Whitesmiths C
manuals in. Surely somebody will want a piece of Silicon Valley
history.

I brought two laptops this trip - the old Thinkpad doesn't do wireless
particularly well, but it has a useable keyboard and runs Linux, so it's
set up in the room. I'm roaming with the Mac, which has a crappy keyboard
and weird key bindings, but it seems to have a better time running
Audacity with my USB interface, which I'll need later.

The net connection in the hotel sucks; it's about the same speed as my DSL
line was before I upgraded, and of course it wants you to authenticate
every time you open a new browser session. Speedtest.net says the closest
server is in Oklahoma, which may explain some things. Doesn't excuse not
saving MAC addresses. Or charging for new in the first place. Come on,
folks -- block port 25, open it up, and make your guests happy.

LinuxWorld Conference and Expo speaker Matt Domsch explains how Dell uses vendors' free drivers at kernel.org to help pick the hardware that goes into the next generation of Dell products. Plus: How well did Michael Dell do with getting his Ubuntu laptop configured and on the company network? And, in honor of the SCO court's decision Friday, a SCO song from hacker/songwriter Steve Savitzky.

Yesterday's schedule turned out to be a little too tight. By the
time I'd finished with my doctor's appointment (my shoulder problem
appears to be tendinitis in the biceps tendon; I also gave him a signed
copy of CC&S) and the associated pharmacy visit (prescription-strength
naproxin and a change of statins from lovastatin to simvastatin) I had to
fly low to have any chance of getting to my group meeting at 10am.
Figured I'd go to the post office at lunchtime, but forgot to factor in
the fact that we were having our Service Awards Lunch.

Lunch was delicious -- Il Fornaio in Palo Alto. I had salad, salmon, and
tiramisu for desert. I also got my 15-year service award, which came with
a lovely (and very heavy) stainless-steel-cased clock from Tiffany &
Co. Do you have any idea how many engraved clocks and pen-and-pencil sets
one accumulates in 30-odd years at a small number of jobs?

Never did make it to the Post Awful, because my OpenMoko phone arrived
mere minutes before lunch, and by the time I looked up from playing with
it, it was after 6pm. Still definitely a work in progress -- I'm not even
sure it's a phone at this point. Nice little linux box, though, with a
VGA display, USB, and BlueTooth. Twice the pixels of an iPhone at half
the price, and unlocked as well. Sweet. The consumer version, due in
October (which may be optimistic) will have Wi-Fi and accelerometers.

I will get to the Post Awful today. In about 15 minutes.
Really. (Most pre-orders will nevertheless have to wait until after
ConChord to get mailed. We're driving down tomorrow.)

Yesterday morning was spent signing CDs and stuffing envelopes in
preparation for the Casa de Chaos
Bash. Even so, I missed a couple of people: I should have had the sense
to just load the entire box of envelopes into the car, and number disks as
needed. (Note: remember this for the next one!)

Finally left about 9:30 and got home to find a slightly upset flower_cat, who had misconstrued a remark I made as she left to
mean that I was following almost immediately. Sorry about that, Love!
I'll try to be more explicit next time. Some good conversations. My
apologies to the folks whose disks I forgot to bring -- I'll have them in
the mail tomorrow.

The schedule for tomorrow morning looks a little tight:

8:30 Doctor. I was able to snag an appointment with my own
doctor on short notice: mainly to discuss my shoulder pain, but he
did want to be told when my CD was ready...

9ish Post office. A handful of disks for people who I don't
expect to see Wednesday or at ConChord, plus the all-important shipment
to CD Baby.

10:00 Work: group meeting (rescheduled from today at 2pm).

12:00 Walkies. I haven't had a proper walk since Saturday
morning.

I might actually get some work done in the afternoon. And I need to stop
at Staples on the way home and get some "Fragile" stickers and lables the
right size for return addresses, and eventually practice for my concert at
ConChord. Which is looking like sometime around mid-day on Sunday.

Today being the day of the annual Linux
Anniversary Picnic, my plan was to go equipped to distribute a couple
of pre-orders, and hopefully sell a few as well. The difficulty was in
determining whose CDs I needed to bring with me.

So far the effort required to catch up has been manageable: I've been
using a simple paper-and-pen list to keep track of the names and numbers
of the copies I've handed out. It will get harder presently, but I think
I'll be ok as long as I can get the rest of the necessary data-entry done
by Wednesday. We leave for ConChord on Thursday.

So far I've delivered two pre-orders today at the Picnic, plus a review
copy and three direct sales. The flower_cat delivered two at
the Baycon picnic; and there have been a little over a dozen pre-orders
and direct sales at work. I expect there to be a lot more at the
Casa de Chaos Bash tomorrow; I'm
going to have to get busy stuffing envelopes and checking off names.
That's my task for tonight and tomorrow morning.

Anyone local who's not going to the Bash tomorrow is welcome to come by
Grand Central
Starport on Wednesday, and I will of course have them at ConChord. I'll be mailing a few on
Monday, but the bulk of the mailing will wait until after ConChord.

Just got done entering my album info for CD
Baby. Took a lot longer than I expected, but it's done. Would have
taken less time if I'd had a suitable bio and album description ready;
instead I had to cobble it together from scattered pieces. A good
exercise anyway.

Went out with the flower_cat for a delightful dinner at
California Cafe in Los Gatos Old Town. Cups of gazpacho, a plate of baked
brie (with apricot jam and a bulb of roasted garlic), and the Fruits de
Mer platter for two (lobster tail, oysters, shrimp cocktail [with dry
ice smoking under the bowl], and snow crab legs. Finished up with a
cheese platter and café mocha for desert. (Actually, the Cat had
the "Marvelous Mocha", which was alcoholic and yummy. But since I'd
already had a Guinness with dinner...

I'd brought home the rest of the CDs mere minutes before we left for
dinner, so we came home to a pile of boxes with a street price
retail value of $15K. Mind-boggling.

(The Y.D. is still out for burger-and-a-movie, by the way, which is why
the Cat and I were able to go out for dinner at a comparatively elegant
restaurant that the kid wouldn't have been happy at.)

Came back from my walk about 1:30 this afternoon and found a big pile of
boxes blocking the door to my office. We have disks. Gave it a
quick preliminary listen: first track, last track, start of every track.
Sounded OK -- nice and clean -- so I distributed the eight pre-orders
already purchased at work, and sold three more. I'll take half of the
boxes home tonight, I think.

... and want a concert slot, or think you've already been promised one,
you need to send email to Rod O'Riley
<rodso64 @ hotmail.com> -- he apparently doesn't have
as many email addresses as he should have.

At this very moment a dozen boxes are on a plane en route from
Philadelphia to South San Francisco.

Meanwhile, I've been cooking on two burners making copies of the
bonus disk. It makes a good background task, except that there's a
noticable risk of doing something in the browser that screws it up. Of
course, there are other things I ought to be working on...

Even as I type, a thousand copies of Coffee, Computers, and Song! are on a loading dock in New Jersey
waiting for a UPS truck to bring them to my doorstepmountain stronghold employer's office. They are scheduled to
arrive on Thursday.

I will have them in time for the Linux Picnic Saturday and the Chaos Castle Bash on Sunday. I
am also frantically burning copies of About
Bleeding Time for the pre-order
packages, a few of which are still available. (It takes about 10
minutes to burn a copy at 8x, which I'm using because burning at full
speed gives me too many errors on the audio.)

Woke up with my shoulder feeling considerably better: down from pain all
over to pain that was pretty localized and felt like a muscle spasm. It's
been getting gradually better all day, though it still hurts to shrug or
to raise my left arm more than 45o above horizontal. Even
that's an improvement: last night horizontal was as far as I could go.
Hooray for gin and Flexoril.

Took a 2.5 mile walk at lunchtime. Went much better than yesterday, when
I only went 2 miles and was feeling distinctly shaky by the time I was
done.

I've been moderately productive at work this week, getting involved in an
interesting side-project involving Google Maps and a bit of browser-side
scripting. So I'm learning Javascript. The syntax is, of course,
familiar; the prototype-based (classless) object semantics are a little
unusual, but fun. (There's a proof, by the way, that classes and
prototypes are formally equivalent in the computations they can perform,
but that's small consolation when you need an anonymous closure for a
callback and the language you're using doesn't provide them. JS
does provide them.)

The equivalence of function in Javascript, blocks in
Smalltalk, and function plus lambda in LISP
makes me feel all warm and comfortable inside.

For the last couple of days I've been trying to work through the exercises
in my old recorder book. I've taken to practicing in the car before
heading home from work, so as to avoid driving my family crazy. (Some
might argue that it's more of a short walk, but I digress.) The book,
Enjoy Your Recorder by the Trapp Family Singers, has been in
my possession for roughly half a century, and I have not been
practicing in all that time, but the fingerings seem oddly familiar.

The album is progressing through the fab line at Oasis; the press run has
started and the CD replication is scheduled. Their tracking web page
leaves a lot to be desired: refreshing the job status page puts you back
two clicks away. Weird. I'm not sure how you would get that effect in
the first place; it may be a side-effect of whatever weird Microsoft crud
they're using on the server side. (It's all .aspx pages, and
some of what they claim are links aren't.)

I've been plagued by doubts about just how thoroughly I QA'ed the master.
I really wish one could simply upload .wav files and a table
of contents, and let them put it together.

The proofs for the album artwork arrived (in the form of links to monster
JPEG and PDF files) early this evening, shortly before I left work.
Apparently it takes several hours for it to work its way through the
upload queue to their proof server.

Their prepress artist found about a dozen nits to pick, but they were all
things artbeco and I had discussed, and many of which we did
on purpose. One comment strongly implied that said prepress artist wasn't
old enough to have seen a punched card in the wild; the rest were almost
certainly boilerplate.

So I told 'em to go anead and, as we say at the copier company where I
work my day job, push the big green button. Fasten your seatbelts!

Our house-guest is gone for a couple of days, our older daughter is off
on an extended visit to her fiance, and for the first time in months I
don't have mixing or editing to do. I'm done, too, with the seemingly
endless succession of test disks to listen to. There are still tasks
left: I have to burn bonus disks, pull together the customer list, and
let's not forget practice, all before ConChord, less than three
weeks away.

No word from Oasis today, but my call this morning verified that the
artwork has been received and is being scrutinized. Proofs are expected
tomorrow, so my working hypothesis is that they haven't found any problems
requiring attention from me or artbeco. But still...

Showed the packaging mock-up to a couple of people at work today. It's
very cool. Not clear how many people are going to read it carefully, but
hopefully they'll at least find the link to the lyrics and other stuff on
the web. If not, well, they'll always have Paris the album.

... Godot proofs. The artwork has been received and is being
scrutinized. Hopefully all is in order; I'll be getting proofs (as links
to PDFs) tomorrow if all goes well.

... proofs a dishwasher. When I got home from OSCon I was
immediately greeted by a sink and dishwasher full of dirty dishes. This
isn't too unusual. But after running the dishwasher, the
situation was essentially unchanged. This is unusual;
fortunately we've been expecting it, and the flower_cat has
been closely following the Western Appliance ads in the paper. Our Bosch
dishwasher is due to arrive this morning. The only color they had in
stock was black, so it'll match our oven but not the cabinets or the
fridge. But it'll make our Goth-girl daughters happy.

09:25 the dishwasher is here. The old one has been leaking; some
cleanup will be required. Work will have to wait.

Even as I type, an 80MB zip file with the artwork for Coffee, Computers, and Song is sitting on a server in New Jersey.
The length matches, anyway; unfortunately they don't supply an MD5 hash.
It took an hour and a half to upload over artbeco's admittedly
rather slow DSL line, so we had a good conversation and didn't really
notice the time. We did it from her place so we could take care of any
last-minute changes; there were a few of them, but not too many.

We'll find out tomorrow morning whether it came through OK; I'm not going
to say it's done until I get the proofs back.

The Portland airport is a good place for walkies. I'll have to remember
that the two sides of the terminal are connected; the security-check lines
were considerably shorter on the D/E side. It's not as if I mind walking.

The backpack is a lot easier to get around with than the rolly, but it's
less accessible for getting stuff in and out, and it gets hard on my back
after a while. I may look for a folding cart.

With the Tux Droid taking up
nearly half the suitcase, things were a little tighter than I like. Wound
up wearing my fleece jacket, which worked great on the way to the
airport but was less convenient after I got there.

A luggage strap with a plastic quick-connect buckle makes a great
temporary belt for going through security. I basically just sailed
through, except for nearly forgetting to pull my computer out of the
backpack.

One of these days I may just have to design the perfect travel backpack
and folding cart, and get somebody to manufacture them.

Album notes

We're uploading artwork today, hooray!

I still haven't quite gotten the hang of selling outmy
soul my stuff; I only sold one physical preorder pack, plus a couple
of nibbles that may lead to web sales. A dozen or so people found the
cards I put out on the flier table. I should also have been handing them
out more freely at the breakfast and lunch tables; I had a tendency to do
it only when the subject came up in the course of the conversation.

Talked briefly with Therese Michaud, who was playing piano in the airport,
and her daughter who was manning the table selling a 5-song demo CD. Only
realized later that I should have just swapped for a preorder pack. Did I
mention that I'm a slow learner?

A good dinner (halibut, Dead Guy ale, and a glass of Dalwhinnie in lieu of
desert), a bit of a walk, enough water... My feet are still a little
annoyed at me, but at least I'm not dragging around like a wet noodle.

I may have gotten a bit dehydrated this afternoon. Ya think?

Plus, before dinner, a reassuring call from my flower_cat.
I'll be home with my Cat and my little girl tomorrow afternoon, and
finishing up the artwork with artbeco sometime on Sunday.

Things are a little lonely here in Portland without cflute,
who was here the last two times I was up here, but...

The bear will be OK. A business trip is all very well, but I miss my
snuggles.

OSCon's final session and wrapup is only ten minutes away; sometime after
2pm or so they'll take down their network and I'll be left hungry and
disconnected. The hunger I'll be able to do something about, but I'll
have a lot of catching up to do on LJ when I get back.

Last night's music BOF only had 4 or 5 people including me; the only
interesting thing was a folding travel banjo (made by Goldtone, IIRC) that
somebody brought.

Few conferences are as well-connected as OSCon - basically you just attach
to the open WiFi network, and you're in. Access in the hotel completely
sucks; I probably won't even be able to print my boarding pass in their
business center.

I've exchanged email with my project manager at Oasis; as long as we get
the artwork files uploaded by 4pm (presumably EDT, so 1pm my time) Monday
we're good to go. That's tighter than I'd like, but OK. I'll aim for
Sunday evening.

On the whole it's been a good conference, but I'll be glad to get home.

I'm travelling lighter than usual this week. Decided to go back to a
backpack as my carry-on after finding out the hard way that a
TravelPro rolling briefcase is remarkably easy to overstuff to the
point where it won't fit under an airplane seat. Ended up with a
pretty nice backpack with the Rick Steves brand, but actually made by
somebody else. It's enough larger than my old Jansport that it
comfortably holds a modern 15.4" laptop, and the front flap hangs
in front of the zippered back section rather than over the
zipper. So you can get out the laptop without unsnapping the flap.

The flap is also asymmetrical, covering a sizeable zippered pocket
(which I'm not using at the moment) but not the mesh bag that holds a
water bottle. Yay! There's a back compartment that the straps stash
into, and enough room over the front pocket and under the flap for me
to put my shoulder bag in order to convince the airline that I only
have one bag. That's less important this trip because I decided not
to take Plink, my little Vagabond travel guitar.

Instead of Plink I took my new Yamaha recorder and my (very) old
recorder book; I'll either re-learn recorder or get dragged out of my
hotel room by my neighbors and drowned in the pool. To give you some
idea of how long I've been out of practice, let me just say that the
book is only a few years younger than my wife.

This is being written at around 11am in the San Jose airport -- they
have nice desks where you can sit and plug in a laptop, but they
don't have free WiFi. So it'll get posted sometime after I
get to Portland.

I note in passing that the master for CC&S has been dropped off at
work for UPS to pick up this afternoon.

4:20pm: Portland Convention Center

I'm here. Nothing much going on, and it seems to be difficult to connect
with LJ here. Hopefully that's temporary. Doesn't matter much, since I'm
currently ssh'ed in to home. I just love the net!

The Mac is its usual hatefull self. Should've brought a real keyboard.
Think I'll go out and look for something to eat before the Meet and Geek
at 7:30.

6:34pm: Convention Center

Seems LJ is totally hosed due to a power outage in San Francisco. So it
goes. Dinner at a Red Robin's. Fried shrinp and fish and chips. Tasty,
and not terribly expensive. They have several local brews on tap; I had a
porter from a brewery whose name I don't remember.

The new backpack is definitely more manoeverable than Rolly, and holds at
least as much stuff. Turns out, from having stuffed it under an airplane
seat, that it's almost exactly the same dimensions. But because it
doesn't have the wheels and so on it's lighter and holds more (though
arranged differently and not necessarily more accessibly. Not quite as
handy if you just want to toss something into it and move on (for example
in a dealer's room or trade show). I'll probably keep using Rolly for SF
cons, for example; you also can't easily use a backpack as an impromptu
music stand.

6:30 am: Red Lion Hotel at the Convention Center

LJ may be back, and my master is "out for delivery". Web access here at
the hotel is unuseably slow, but I can ssh ok, for the moment. Here goes!

I am currently listening to the master for Coffee, Computers, and Song! "Little Computing Machine" needed one
last tweak, so I had to burn a couple more (on the good media,
thank you -- next time I'll buy the really good stuff; recommendations
gladly accepted). I burned one on the Samsung drive in Trantor, and
another on the Plextor on Harmony. The Plextor won, which was a little
surprising. Both wanted to run at 8x; that may be a media thing.

Tomorrow I'll run it up to work -- we get a discount from UPS, and they
pick up every afternoon. Then I hop on a plane to Portland. This time
tomorrow I'll be at OSCon, and my master will be on a plane to Oasis in New Jersey. Hopefully by
this time next week my artwork will be on a server somewhere at Oasis, and
on its way to an offset press.

There are flaws. Unlike some folks on my flist, I'm not really in a
position to say it's entirely made of awesome, but it's all pretty good,
and parts of it are excellent. cflute's vocals on "Silk and
Steel" are heartbreakingly beautiful, "Vampire Mega-Byte" has some cool
special effects (if I may say so), my kids (who appear to have inherited
my inability to sing consistently on key) come together so sweetly at
the end of "Daddy's World" that any earlier flaws are entirely forgiven.

If I were starting now, it would be much better and take a lot less time.
But it wouldn't be on its way to a date with destinydare
we hope ConChord? the duplicators. Tomorrow.

I have an ostensible master ready to ship to Oasis, and have put a
sizeable but not excessive payment on my Amex card. The sensation is
surprisingly familiar from having been in at the birth of my kids. It's
mostly fear.

I don't have any really good way of verifying my disks; the only program I
know of on Linux is qpxtool, and it only seems to know about
Plextor drives. If anyone knows of something better, or knows whether
something free that runs on a Macbook Pro or a Windows XP machine will do
the job, I'd appreciate a link. I do get a little feedback from
cdrdao read-toc; found out that the Fuji
inkjet-printable disks I have a spindle of have a lot more CRC errors than
the Memorex disks.

I did determine that cdrdao wasn't writing the CD
text correctly, so I ended up falling back on k3b, which
just fscking works. If only it could take project info from a
text file... Especially if it were the same toc file
cdrdao uses. Grump. Also discovered that my drive won't go
any slower than 8x. Should be OK, but...

Things are going to be a little tight tomorrow, since I'm flying up to
Portland for OSCon around noon. I'm going to give the disk one more listen in the
car on my way to and from work today, and live with it on headphones for a
while.

Tweaked the guitar up a little on "Programmer's Alphabet". The last
tweak? Maybe. I'm about 2/3 (12/18) of the way through the third listen
in its present state.

If I hadn't stupidly procrastinated on the graphics, I could ship it all
off on Monday. In any case, I'm pretty sure I'll have a master to put in
the mail. Guess I'd better start filling out the paperwork...

"Programmer's Alphabet" needs a little more guitar, I think. And I'm
still of two minds about "High Barratry" -- the performance I have on the
disk at the moment (from Baycon) is a better performance; the older one
(from Consonance) had better audience reaction and better voice/instrument
balance. Both have serious problems with with the sound, but they're
different problems. I'll probably stay put, but just for
reference you'll find the old one here: [ogg][mp3] and the current favorite here: [ogg][mp3]. You'll find the complete set of current rips in
<http://steve.savitzky.net/Albums/coffee/Rips/>; the flac versions
are hopelessly out of date because they take too long to push.

By coincidence, July 20 was the original due date for our first child,
which is why chaoswolf's middle name is Diana. She decided to
arrive early, though, which is why she celebrates her birthday during
Westercon.

This year, I'm celebrating by burning a disk which I hope is
epsilon away from a master for Coffee, Computers, and Song! (It's still available for preorder for
the next few weeks. After it's real I'll have to start charging sales tax
and shipping.)

Update: I had to dash to get to a meeting at work, but about 1/2 hour
after posting this I put a call in to Oasis and set the wheels in motion.
I'm feeling much better about the schedule since discovering that I can get
the project fast-tracked for only an extra $200. Disks at ConChord are
looking at least possible, if not inevitable.

Touched more than half of the tracks today -- 10 out of 18. Mostly
comparatively minor tweaks. "Guilty Pleasures" needed to be taken down
2dB; haven't quite figured out how to do that automagically yet, so I have
to remember to do it whenever I update. Added some bass boost to my
vocals on "Cicero", which makes it match its neighbors a little better.

"Someplace in the Net" was more problematic. I was singing three parts on
the choruses: two in unison, and one (a lame attempt at) low harmony.
Trouble was, the unison parts weren't quite in sync. Took out the extra
one, and it seems considerably cleaner.

The comments on this
post have been very helpful. Keep 'em coming. To repeat,
you'll find the whole darned album, at least through Monday, at
<steve.savitzky.net/Albums/coffee/Rips/>, or you can use the ogg or mp3 playlists.

Especially on some of my older tracks, I would have problems clicking my
fingernails against the pick-guard when I strum. In most cases it's
minor, and I've left it in, since there doesn't seem to be any good way to
filter it out. But a pair of multiple clicks in the intro to
"Programmer's Alphabet" have been bothering me for a couple of weeks now.

On the other hand, the prospect of recording a new intro, then trying to
match levels and eq with a track that's been in the system and messed with
Gods-know-how for a couple of years, was totally daunting. Not going to
happen. On the gripping hand, I used to have a lot of trouble keeping the
number of beats in the instrumental breaks between verses consistent, and
I realized this morning that I could take advantage of that: there were a
couple of breaks that were long enough to cover the clicks in the intro.

So by leaving in the first chord of the original intro, and fading in to
the first verse, I was able to splice it in pretty well. I think I
might be able to notice something odd if I listened to it
repeatedly and didn't go violently mad first, but it's no more than a
couple of milliseconds off.

I lucked out on this one -- there aren't many, if any, other tracks where
I could have pulled off this particular hack. Fortunately it was the
worst of them by far. I think the only other one with noticable clicks in
the intro is "Cicero", and it's not as bad. Good thing, because I don't
think I could fix that one.

Added short-form track credits to some of the various listing formats. In
general, this replaces timings (which mostly aren't all that useful except
on places like the tray card) with the name of the songwriter, or
lyricist/composer if they're different. You can see the results here, for
example.

Did the final edits on "Little Computing Machine" this morning. Might
have just a trifle too much reverb, but it'll take another listen or two
to be sure. And it may need a bit of auto-duck on the choruses. But
that was the last piece of the puzzle.

From here on it's all tweaking.

7:10 -- edited out the last second or so of "Cicero" -- there were some odd clicks in the guitar track. No big deal, but I'm glad I caught them. I gave the complete set of oggs a listen at work.

8:00 -- last tweaks on "LCM" and a full listen on headphones. Sounding good.
If the graphics were done (stupid Bear!) I'd be tempted to ship it
tomorrow. Probably just as well I can't.

(The mood is accurate: I have a long history of not finishing projects, and I've been sort of ok with that. Commitment is, in its way, frightening. The fact that I'm about a week away from shipping off a stack of disks, paperwork, and a substantial check to a duplicating house is, frankly, scary.)

9:38 -- more like a week and a half before the artwork is done. Hopefully not as long as two weeks, but we'll see.

Cleanup on "Daddy's World" and "High Barratry" (made an audacity project
out of the live wav file, and trimmed off a little applause). Gave
another listen to my vocals in "Bugs", "Daddy's World", and "TEOTW" and
decided that bass boost wasn't necessary. (This included actually trying
it on "TEOTW" -- barely noticable -- and doing A/B comparisons with "World
Inside the Crystal" which is one of my gold standards.)

The only tracks still needing cleanup are "Little Computing Machine" and
"Someplace in the Net"; EQ wants to be checked on those plus "I Wanna Be
a Webmaster", "Guilty Pleasures", and "Mushrooms".

(later:) EQ on "Net" is OK. "Guilty"'s OK. "Mushrooms" is OK.
"Wannabe"'s OK. So that leaves cleanup on "Net" and cleanup with possible
bass boost on "LCM". OTOH it may just need a little more reverb.

18:45: "Net" done. There's one spot in the second verse where which version
to use is really too close to call; I'm going to go with what I have.

19:35: Cleanup done on "LCM"; EQ and part selection close. Audacity's
"acoustic" curve seems to help a fraction. I'm going to sit on it for a
while and have some dinner.

Just after Baycon cflute and I listened to the album on my
livingroom stereo and Callie noticed that the bass was exceptionally
boomy. The effect largely went away on my high-quality headphones or my
studio monitors (which, admittedly, don't have a whole lot of bass).

Giving it another listen in the livingroom, I finally realized why: It's
not that my speakers are particularly bass-heavy, it's all the
junk piled in front of them. In particular, piled right in front
of the tweeters. It's not that they have a lot of bass, it's that the
treble is being attenuated. A lot.

I listened to the album twice today -- once in the car, and once on my
computer at work (through both headphones and a set of cheap earbuds).
It's sounding ok. Levels are pretty good. Nothing that sends me out of
the room screaming. I'll do a couple more checks tomorrow.

The artwork's going slower than I'd like, but it's my own damned stupid
fault. It should be heading out to Oasis by the end of the month, I
think. With luck, I might have some disks in hand by ConChord.

Cleanup on 6 more tracks: "Cicero", "Silk and Steel", "Demon Lover",
"TEOTW", "Vampire Megabyte", "World Inside the Crystal". That leaves only
the four tracks that might still need a little actual work: "High
Barratry", which needs to have the .wav file copied out of the concert
directory; "Daddy's World", where I still feel there's some work to be
done; and "Little Computing Machine" and "Someplace in the Net", both of
where I want to go back and compare the last two of my vocal parts to see
which is better on which verse. "Daddy's World" has a lot of clicks where
my fingernails hit the pick-guard when I strum; not clear whether to try
again or leave them in. I've never managed to play that one
without clicks, so it might be a lot of frustrating work for
nothing.

There are some developments in the non-audio status, too. I've been
making notes on the graphics, and decided to ship them off to artbeco to be turned into real Photoshop files by a real artist.
The other possibility was to download a trial copy of CS3, struggle
through the layout on my own, and come up with something that looks like
it was done by a programmer pretending to be a graphic designer. Or throw
money at Oasis; their designers are good and professional, but they don't
know me and don't have a history with the project.

The remaining tasks are to give the cleaned-up tracks another couple of
rounds of listen-and-tweak, get some additional text and logo graphics to
artbeco, and to cook up a permission-to-publish form for the
performers to sign.

I've started the cleanup process: this consists of copying the most
recent version of each track to a fresh Audacity project called
to-ccs, and removing all the tracks that are muted out. This
should result in a cleaner final track, even if the difference isn't
audible in most cases. I know there's some audible
bleed-through. So far I've done "guilty", "alphabet", "mushroom",
"stuck", and "wannabe", so that's a one less than 1/3 done. It goes
quickly, though; there are only a couple of tracks that will need more
tweaking before I can clean them up.

Well, I think I have a pretty good idea now of what I want in the way of
graphics for the album. What I don't have is any way of getting
from vague ideas to something Oasis can actually, like, print. I
have absolutely no talent for graphic design, and no experience with the
tools I'd need. Spent about an hour playing with The Gimp and Inkscape
(comparable in capability and complexity to Photoshop and Illustrator,
respectively) and discovered that it would probably take me several days
to get to the point where I could even do an approximation of
what I want.

I may have one or two coworkers I can turn to. Not clear; it's a very
busy couple of weeks at work. I will probably end up throwing more money
at Oasis -- their rates are actually pretty reasonable.

Meanwhile, I think the main thing I have to do to the tracks is cleanup.
Audacity doesn't seem to have a way to leave a track in the project but
not in the mix -- you can mute them on playback, but they still get added
in when you export. Reducing the volume sort of works, but
they're still in there adding to the noise floor, and although I suppose
you could expand the scale to the point where you really could
reduce them down to zero, it'll be simpler to just copy the projects and
delete the tracks I don't want. Not rocket science -- I think I can do it
pretty quickly, then re-tweak the mixes if necessary.

Next week sometime? It's not totally impossible, if I can just keep
focussed on -- Oooh! Shiny!

Took my new little UP3 ogg player out for my walk this morning. Five
miles again (might actually be a little longer, or I may just be walking
more slowly than I used to). Nice and clear. There was a nasty moment
when I heard childrens' voices over "Paper Pings", but it wasn't there
when I checked again on the way home. Not on the CD, which I was playing
in the car, nor on the player when I pulled over by the Rose Garden and
gave it a careful listen. Must have been in the background when I was
walking.

Came home (after looking for whistles at Guitar Center and coming up
empty, as expected) and looked online. Turns out A whistles are
generally considered "low whistles" and are somewhat scarce, though I
turned them up at Susato who seem to have a very complete and not terribly expensive
line-up.

A: Ok. The tinwhistle, also called a pennywhistle, a tin whistle, a penny
whistle, or just plain "whistle," is an end-blown fipple flute which
utilizes the 6-hole, "simple" flute fingering system. This is an old
system that predates modern "Boehm" flutes. In popular usage, the word
"fipple" often refers to the sound generating system in which air is blown
through a channel, split by a blade--which causes turbulence in the
area--which produces vibration--which produces sound. And so on. The
6-hole system consists of open, unkeyed holes, normally covered by your
fingers and uncovered in various patterns to produce notes. The 6-hole
system also appears on instruments such as fifes, bamboo flutes, 10-speed
bicycles and many Tex-Mex chili dishes.

I started looking for an A whistle because I've been hearing a
countermelody for "Someplace in the Net" that I think would work well on a
whistle. But even if I'd found one, and even if I could play it straight
off without practicing (HAH!), I don't think there's time to get it onto
the CD, which is close enough to done that I'm actively looking for things
not to fix. For example, the drum parts on "Guilty Pleasures"
and "Wannabe" would benefit from fixing a couple of missed beats.
Worthwhile? Probably not. If I started tweaking those I might
not come up for air until next week sometime. That would be bad.

After the album is in the can, I'm going to get back to flute,
recorder, and whistle. Really. Meanwhile, I have verified that my Yamaha
recorder can be tuned a quarter-tone flat. Evil is possible. OK, it's
not as potentially evil as what you could do with a 12-string.

Tracks worked on this afternoon: "Little Computing Machine": pulled up
the guitar part a little. "Vampire Megabyte": pulled up a too-quiet word
at the start of the last verse. Decided that "Daddy's World" is just fine
without a percussion part. So I can stick a fork in that one, too.